Drawing Lesson
2015–2018
This series consists of three paintings of empty interiors, six photographic still lifes and a video projection. The paintings, entitled Picture Space, are colour variations on a single subject: a few freely drawn lines creating a schematic interior in linear perspective. The black-and-white photographs show objects assembled in compositions as commonly found in art schools. The video, in which a hand places toy easels in rows in an abstract space strengthens the impression of play and a staged art school, where all signs have been de-energized and transformed into fragments of big ideas and aspirations having to do with ‘high culture’. Paperno plays with the canonical set of concepts, terms and exercises traditionally used to tell (and reproduce) the history of European painting – perspective, picture space, still life, a classroom setting – and the series becomes a statement about painting as a medium, its genealogy and the context of meanings that invariably go with it. The paintings make an ironic comment on the history of painting, beginning with the Renaissance invention of linear perspective and the emergence of mathematically constructed space in which people, scenes and subjects are positioned. There is no hint of a narrative in these pictures. Everything disintegrates as if not quite reaching reality, like perspective itself: the lines quiver and almost vanish, as if they were traces or, just the reverse, students’ attempts at marking out a picture space.
The works “Pictorial Space” were made specially for exhibition “Self-Love among the Ruins”
Exhibition “Self-Love among the Ruins” at Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow
Curated by Ekaterina Inozemtseva
November 13–December 13, 2018
Exhibition views by Anastasia Soboleva
Excerpt from:
Untitled (from Drawing Lesson series)
2018
Video 6 min.
Starring: Alex Korsi (the hand)
Director of Photography: Alexander Simonov
Sound Design: Ivan Lebedev
Set Construction: Nadezhda Busheneva
Color Correction: Anastasia Soboleva, Daniil Nikolsky
Cosmosfilm Post-Production Department
Project Management: Spasibo Studio